You’re in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. It’s lunch time. You have an hour (less travel time) to grab a bite to eat and unwind as much as much of the morning’s stresses as you can before you head back into the fray. Given such a scenario, I often fall back to a small handful of tried-and-true favourites. Ichiban Boshi in Bondi Junction just happens to be one of them.

Ramen is pretty much the main thing that Ichiban Boshi is known for. In case of the one pictured above, negi miso ramen. This is one of my more favoured ramen sold at Ichiban Boshi, with the favourite being either the very hot (geki-kara) ramen or the aburi chashu ramen, depending on my mood.

The negi miso ramen consists of a miso based ramen soup, a large pile of slivered spring onions (the negi part) as well as other accompaniments such as marinated bamboo shoots, corn and a single piece of tender roast pork that almost falls apart in the mouth.

If you’re too impatient and don’t let the spring onions soften a little within the steaming ramen soup, it can get a bit on the chewy side if you happen to get a big mouthful of it all at once. What I do to deal with this is to submerge all the spring onions, find something to distract myself with for a minute or so (twitter on a PDA phone comes in very handy for this) and then devour as normal. It’s pretty good for something under $10.

On occasion (usually when I don’t have time for breakfast) I order a side dish to accompany the ramen. In this case it the tonkatsu. Somewhat crunchy on the outside. Somewhat juicy on the inside. The tonkatsu sauce and mustard are there but unfortunately there’s no shredded cabbage for some reason. Just a bed of lettuce, which was a bit of a letdown for me.

It’s not bad for what you pay for ($4 from memory).  Just don’t expect it to be as good as places that specialise in making good tonkatsu.

Have a favourite place for lunch in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, or anywhere else for that matter? Would love to hear from you, so please leave a comment! :)

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